Charloween

This is what my chapter's about:



More or less.

I should explain: I was choosing slides for my presentation and detoured through a gif maker.

ETA: On reflection, that doesn't really explain it at all.

Today's meeting with my supervisor included a discussion that, were I to put it into my thesis, would have to be titled something like, "Farscape vs. Smallville: Grimdark Monkeycrack vs. Big Dumb Alien".

Scary part is a sentence or two of that discussion might indeed end up in the thesis. #Catbaby is going in. All hail #catbaby!

I need to kick it in gear and finish excising 4000 words from Document A, create an abstract + bibliography + 15 minute conference paper from Document B, and then go to London to catch a taping of The Unbelievable Truth on Tuesday. And reply to ALL THE EMAILS. Plus I'm working all day on Saturday. ...All hail #catbaby? *paws at air*


(My supervisor also wrote "Good work." at the end of her comments on this latest flail of writing, so I am reassured I'm on the right track.)

Today, in my office (I have an office!), I spent most of the afternoon reading about remote controls (you know, for your TV!) and deciding that for my purposes, the VCR was probably the more significant technological change than the remote.

It was possible to change channels and/or volume pre-RCD ("remote control device", which sounds more academic than "zapper-thing"), the RCD just makes things easier. The VCR, on the other hand, made possible a totally different set of interactions.

It doesn't just represent a more convenient way to do something you'd been planning to do already (i.e. watch TV), it means that you can fit your TV-watching around your life, rather than always having to be parked in front of the set at a time chosen by some network exec. It also means you can fit shows into your life that you wouldn't otherwise been able to see (here I'm thinking of trading tapes with people overseas). (It did, however, come with its own RCD, thus heralding a multi-RCD universe and ensuring that everyone will, at some point in their life, point one at the wrong device and swear when "The [expletive deleted] thing isn't working.")

Therefore RCD = convenient, VCR = game-changer.

...what do you think?

I saw four plays at Stratford in the last five days. More on that later. Rather than thinking about that I'm obsessing about tomorrow morning: visiting the UK Boarder Agency for the dread biometrics appointment. Idk, the UK wants retinal scans or something.

More importantly, it's where I can drop off all my paperwork and supporting documents for my visa. It's also where I can beg to pay to be one of the day's 20 priority applicants, to see my visa before the end of next week. Versus in four weeks, right before I travel.

It feels a little shady and a little Eastern Bloc to pay to jump the queue. If I didn't, though, I'd be unbearably twitchy and nervous for the next month.

If all goes as planned I'll only be unbearably twitchy and nervous until Monday afternoon (defending The Thesis!), with sustained moderate-to-high twitchy-and-nervous in the forecast until next Friday (by which point I might have the visa in hand and thesis revisions completed*).

And then: packing. Augh!

*I am starting to believe it might actually be not terrible. It being the defend-and-revise coda to my last two years.

Before breaking for soccer* I spent the morning finding more-academic ways to say things like:
1. "self-aggrandizing claims of bad-assery"
2. "textual cockblocking versus denial of a continuing relationship"
3. "this connotation is aided by the diegetic tea"

At one point, I ran downstairs to ask my mother what a good synonym for "chutzpah" would be, because I wanted to say that when someone said a character was "having a ball" there was a triple-meaning 'cause he was a) having fun, b) had a sphere beside him, and c) (as per Mum's suggestion) was audacious.

I've been keeping a post-it list of the bits I've had to reword.

...back to it!

*The Dutch obviously had a Don Cherry's Rock'em Sock'em marathon before the match. Disappointing. But listening to the BBC's commentators snark through the match was fantastic.

My thesis has a lot of Barthes, in fact, the theoretical foundation is pretty much the way captions, as he says, "help choose the correct level of perception" when you're looking at a photojournalism. It's all very political.

My thesis also has a lot of Doctor Who, in fact, the episodes I picked (thinking that one show would be as analytically fruitful as another, all things considered) are the ones that use "perception filters" as an important plot point. It's all very sufficiently advanced tech = magic.

This is either awesome or horrifying.

I can't make it all about the perception filters (or about the idea of a fluid, postmodern identity vis-a-vis regeneration), but I probably can add an apologetic appendix to the thesis declaring I totally didn't mean to pick examples that explicitly address the same themes as my thesis. It was an accident, I swear I wasn't trying to be coy.

Joss Whedon snuck into my thesis. (Fun fact: "snuck" is apparently a Canadianism.) This latest summary was of an article about Buffy/Spike, Buffy/Angel and Spike/Angel and I happened to have a good vid with those three that I could use an example. That means I got to write:

Angel is distressed that Buffy's carnal inclinations are directed to Angel's former student and rival.

It's like the bad described-audio version of Angel's epic man-pain. I want to write more in this style, but my tone already wanders between silly, angry and overly-casual... so maybe not.

( Hey piratefanatic! Click here to live vicariously! )

That's right: done.

Demon paper, paper from the darker circles of the Inferno, paper on political economy: done.

It's isn't technically my Last Term Paper Ever in this degree, but I'm expecting my directed reading to be: a) fun, b) not dealing with systems of knowledge that resist making sense no matter how much I whine about them, and also c) useful.

(Not that this paper wasn't entirely un-useful. It made me re-read Stuart Hall's "Encoding/Decoding" and I found something there I'd missed before about the dual nature of media consumption: that it happens both materially - buy a newspaper, watch a tv show - and also discursively - make what you read/watch meaningful in the most basic and also complex ways possible. But he argues that the material consumption is meaningless without discursive consumption, meaning that the study of media content is just as important as larger structural issues. ...I like theory. *happysigh*)

And then it's Thesis Time. If my previous thesis experience is anything to go by, I'll either disappear until it's done or spam this space with daily page count updates and moanings about my scholastic inadequacy. (I suppose my ability to use a phrase like "scholastic inadequacy" means I'm probably playing in the correct league. Also, *points to previous paragraph*)

Just, you know, FYI.

...I'm going to get another beer, open that Ben & Jerry's Brownie Cheesecake ice cream I paid $9 for, and finally watch the new season of In Plain Sight. Maybe just one episode. Or two. 3x02 is called "When Mary Met Marshall". ♥